Article June 28, 1919 Issue

Maintenance

ELEANORA BURDETT CARR

There have been men in every age who stand out as the great men of their century; succeeding generations, therefore, are set to study the lives of these heroes in order to benefit thereby, such examples proving to be a profitable inspiration to one who learns to appreciate them by studying their motives and sources of strength. Those are the really great men who have faithfully served Principle, and they are very far removed from those who have sometimes seemed to the world to be powerful because they were self-assertive and successful through their domination of others. It will be found, however widely apart the currents of thought which evolved them may have flowed, that while one great character may differ from another in many ways, the great luminaries in the human constellation share one trait in common, which is indeed the corner stone of all beauty of character, the essential of all true greatness, namely, steadfastness.

A great man who devoted his whole life to the fundamental ideas in which he believed, inherited as part of the heraldic device of his house the motto, "Je maintiendrai" (I will maintain), and it is related that while at first he merely read its meaning as applying to the finest traditions of his own name, William of Orange gradually realized that he was to maintain his country and his country's faith free from submission to the oppressor, and further that he was as William III of England to stand firm as the defender of the Protestant faith in Europe. During all his life he maintained Principle in so far as he perceived it, in the face of colossal opposition.

There is real kingship in this conception of duty, and this idea is shadowed forth in the symbol called the cap of maintenance among the royal insignia of Great Britain, which is carried immediately before a British sovereign at his coronation. The word maintain means to hold or keep, not to surrender, and it was often brought to our notice, during the recent war, in the bulletins of the daily papers, which frequently stated that some position or trench captured the day before was or was not maintained during the night. There were times when a position maintained meant a real defeat to the enemy,—times when it required all that could possibly have been demanded of brave soldiers merely to maintain some hardly pressed point.

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